So as a guest writer for this week’s Buzz I’m required to write up an interesting article, or Max will shoot me. Most of you who read the forums once in a while will have seen me posting opinions that aren't always in line with commonly held views. For this article I’ll get into cheating a bit. Cheating, is it really that harmful? My answer, no it doesn’t need to be harmful, it can even be beneficial.
Back when I started playing Bootleggers in round 4 the amount of cheats were huge. Most players had 2 or 3 account, some even half a dozen, and plenty of exploits were about in the world of Bootleggers. The end result of it all was a very much alive and active game with plenty of action, yet no one needed to fear getting killed at ‘random’ or being dominated by a small group, the widespread duping and exploiting made sure of that. The only person that had a problem with it all was BSF2000, he probably lost thousands of dollars profit due to the exploits that allowed people to create their own points. At the start of round 5 these exploits got fixed, and rightfully so.
Lets first look at dupes. Dupes are only harmful if only a few people have them. And this is exactly what has happened over the past so many years. Slowly but surely duping was made harder but far from impossible, ending with only a relative few who could / were still successfully duping.
Dupes don’t need to be harmful at all, just takes a bit of good managing. Personally I would say that accounts that only ever (or mostly) log on via company networks, (proxy)servers, schools, universities, public wifi and such still get banned, for the rest the FA rules can still apply meaning you cant just be your own OC team and such. In fact, I think dupes can make the game look nice and active and they make sure that dominating becomes a lot harder. If everyone can have say 4 accounts the amount of targets increases by a factor of 4, but the resources needed to shoot do not (a bullet factory still produces the same amount of bullets and no extra points get into the game).
Scripts / bots are where it gets interesting as they did not appear for no reason at all. First off, scripts come in two categories, the script that gathers information and the scripts that do crimes and such. The use of a crime scripts is pretty obvious, make money the easy way. In the latter stages of round 5 and first months of round 6 most people in the game used a trick on the internet browser Firefox. And as so many used it the harm it did to the balance of power was negligible. Only when people started to get banned for auto-reloading (failing CAPTCHA’s) most people stopped. Some however went on, to create scripts that could beat the CAPTCHA’s and as that worked pretty well these people got a huge boost in power.
Information scripts are where it gets fun, why are they around? I think it’s because some players want to have certain information to try and eliminate potential treats to them (the idea of domination). In the early days players could simply use the find player page and get a list of every high rank in the game inside 2 minutes and this was used by some to systematically shoot the ‘unknown’ high ranks. The Elite Guard seemingly didn’t like this idea very much as they removed this option. It was at that point that I first heard of a so call ‘L.Don script’ (if they were around before it was just because people where lazy). In other words, a publicly available source of information got removed, thinking it would stop the shooting. But the reason why the shooting happened was and still is here today, its domination.
When a couple months later the Elite Guard also changed the wealth status’ it was, to me, instantly clear that shooting rich accounts was a really good idea to eliminate potential treats. The logical follow up was also simple, scripts would be altered not to just look for high ranks, but for wealth too. Although its now impossible to directly script for wealth there are still plenty of indirect ways to do it and the Elite Guard's way of trying to fix this created just as many problems as it solved.
The fix for this is, to me, pretty easy. If people want to have information, give it to them. First make every bit of information that you can find out from profiles and other 'public BL' sources as useless / meaningless as possible. Next create all kinds of features that allow everyone to find whatever they want (wealth, bullets, guns and such) about whoever they want, obviously at a price. A combination of new detective abilities and establishment buildings is what I’ve suggested more than once to the Elite Guard. With this you create a level playing field where everyone can use these features. Although I can kinda predict that those who play Bootleggers, the social network game, will not use it and simply rely on the kindness of the universe (or the mods) to keep them safe but that will be their problem and when they get shot they got no right to bitch or cry about it.
So, to me it seems that the goal isn't to stop cheating, its to mitigate the unfair advantage cheats give. If that is reached by 'allowing' certain things that are considered cheating, why not do it? Another thing that needs to happen is for the Elite Guard to think things through before implementing / removing things. The current members of the Elite Guard are in some ways still dealing with mistakes previous members of the Elite Guard made over the past years. I think Moxie said it right a couple weeks ago, a seemingly minor change can have major consequences.
